Mughal Empire

The Mughal Empire was a Muslim Indian empire that existed from 1526 to 1540 and from 1555 to 1857, with Agra serving as its capital for much of the period until 1648 and Delhi serving as capital from 1648 onwards. The empire was founded by the Turco-Mongol Chagatai conqueror Babur after the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, during which he overthrew Ibrahim Lodi's Afghan Lodi dynasty and annexed the Delhi Sultanate. The Mughals combined Persian culture with Indian cultural influences, and it extended over nearly all of the Indian Subcontinent at its height. With the rise of Akbar the Great in 1556, the region enjoyed economic progress and religious harmony, and Akbar subdued most of the Rajput kingdoms. The empire reached its zenith under Aurangzeb, but his death in 1707 marked the start of the empire's decline. The Maratha military resurgence under Shivaji led to the Mughals losing control over southern India, and the Marathas had routed Mughal armies and won over Mughal provinces from Punjab to Bengal by the mid-1700s. Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad, and other former provinces declared their independence from the decaying empire, and the empire was decentralized and forced to become a vassal state of the United Kingdom during the 19th century. In 1857, after Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was found to have supported the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British crown ended the Mughal Empire and unified all of the Indian princely states into the British Raj.